Sunday, June 24, 2012

Palin Was A Dumb Gamble, Not A Smart Gamble

Alex Koppelman argues that nominating Sarah Palin kind of made sense, because McCain needed to roll the dice with the economy going down and all:

By the summer of 2008, McCain could see he’d been dealt a bad hand. He couldn’t escape George W. Bush’s unpopularity, and he knew that the rapidly worsening economy would be blamed on Bush, and, by extension, on his fellow Republicans. He was almost certain to lose. At that point, he had a couple options: one was to play it safe, try to keep things close, prevent a landslide. By doing that, he could avoid being the next Walter Mondale—but he couldn’t win. Or he could take a risk, pick someone like Palin who would shake up the campaign. Sure, she might hurt him, but he was going to lose anyway. In exchange, he got a chance at victory—a small chance, maybe, but that’s better than no chance at all.

High-risk, high-reward strategies do make sense when you're behind. I don't think the economic data backs up Koppelman's story, though. Here's the S&P 500 and NASDAQ throughout 2008. Things weren't going great, but they weren't going too badly either when McCain gave Palin the nomination on August 27. It's in September that the market started to slide, and October when it really crashed. Unless McCain was a lot smarter than most investors, he didn't see the bad news coming.

The polling doesn't really help McCain look smart either. Polls generally had Obama leading by 1-4 points in the days leading up to the Palin nomination. One or two had McCain ahead, and the GOP convention was just around the corner. McCain was roughly in the situation Romney is now -- a little behind, but not much. So it's hard to see Palin as anything but an unnecessary risk.

who we are

Nicholas Beaudrot is an accidental political observer living in Seattle, Washington. By day he writes software for Amazon.com, snowboards, and plays ultimate frisbee. By night [and morn] he posts to this blog, runs the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, and tries to cook decent Italian cuisine. A graduate of Brown University with a joint degree in Mathematics-Computer Science, in late 2003 Nicholas felt the urge to put his knack with numbers towards a greater social purpose than winning his fantasy baseball league or taking up poker, perhaps in an act of penance for not voting in 2000. He has been spotted standing in line for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, on the Atlanta area quiz bowl program "Hi-Q", and as a young boy in national broadcasts of the Christmas Eve service at the Cathedral of Saint Philip. If you play Halo 3, Team Fortress II, Rock Band 2, Catan, or a number of other games, he's on Xbox live as niq24601.

Neil Sinhababu is a philosophy professor at the National University of Singapore. It's a tropical island with good public transit and they're very nice about not caning him. He's fond of red-state college towns like Austin, where he got his PhD. Much of his research is in ethics — hence his alias "Neil the Ethical Werewolf," which contains the name of his philosophy blog. He has also published on Nietzsche and on how to have a girlfriend in another universe. His utilitarianism shapes his goals and tactical views, and makes it impossible for him to stay away from politics. At Harvard, he won a student government election by eating fire in each dorm room in his district. He'd be happy to use this skill to help Democrats in tough races. He likes drinking with smart people and dancing in altogether ridiculous ways. At his last project, War or Car, he showed that you could buy each US household a Prius or each panda a stealth bomber for the price of the Iraq War.